109 quotes found
"What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course."
"Everything you wanted to know about a person was written in the face, she believed. It’s not that she believed that the shape of the head was what counted – even if there were many who still clung to that belief; it was more a question of taking care to scrutinise the lines and the general look. And the eyes, of course; they were very important. The eyes allowed you to see right into a person, to penetrate their very essence, and that was why people with something to hide wore sunglasses indoors. They were the ones you had to watch very carefully."
"The maid glanced at her employer. "Oh, you have heard of me," she said. "I am glad that he speaks of me. I would not like to think that nobody speaks of me." "No," said Mma Ramotswe. "It is better to be spoken of than not to be spoken of. Except sometimes, that is.""
"It is not enough just to identify a problem; there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted."
"The thought of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni nursing secret, unfulfilled ambitions saddened Mma Ramotswe, as did the thought of people wanting something very much indeed and not getting the thing they yearned for. When we dismiss or deny the hopes of others, she thought, we forget that they, like us, have only one chance in this life."
"Late people talk to us, she thought; they talk to us, but most of the time we are not listening because we are so busy with what we are doing here and now and there are so many problems to be dealt with. But then, when we stop for a moment and catch our breath, we might just hear the voices of the late people who love us, and they are whispering to us, quietly, like the wind that moves across the dry grass; and we know that it is them, although we also know that it cannot be them, for they are late. And so we try hard to hear, just to be sure, and their voices fade away and there is nothing once again."
"The sentiment sounded trite, but then didn’t most good sentiments sound trite? It was hard to make goodness – and good people – sound interesting. Yet the good were worthy of note, of course, because they battled and that battle was a great story, whereas the evil were evil because of moral laziness, or weakness, and that was ultimately a dull and uninteresting affair."
"When we love others, we naturally want to talk about them, we want to show them off, like emotional trophies. We invest them with a power to do to others what they do to us; a vain hope, as the lovers of others are rarely of much interest to us. But we listen in patience, as friends must, and as Isabel now did, refraining from comment, other than to encourage the release of the story and the attendant confession of human frailty and hope."
"Each of us is born into our own mysteries…but the mystery of another might just take us in and embrace us. And then what a sense of homecoming, of belonging!"
"We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters."
"And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do."
"’They are a very great boon to mankind, dentists,’ said Isabel. ‘And I’m not sure that we are grateful enough to them. I’m not sure that we even bother to thank them.’ She paused. Were there any statues of dentists? She thought not. And yet there should be."
"Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check."
"People often don't appreciate how complex happiness may be. They think that happy people are shallow, which can be so wrong. It's actually far easier to be unhappy than it is to be happy. It requires more effort, more understanding, more character to be consistently happy."
"Pat looked up at the cornice. "I’m on a gap year," she said, and added, because truth required it after all: "It’s my second gap year, actually." Bruce stared at her, and then burst out laughing. "Your second gap year?" Pat nodded. She felt miserable. Everybody said that. Everybody said that because they had no idea of what had happened. "My first one was a disaster," she said. "So I started again.""
"The woman shook her head. "Not easy," she said. "I believe that we have much less free will than we think. Quite frankly, we delude ourselves if we think that we are completely free. We aren’t. And that means if dear Bruce must have rather a lot of girlfriends, then there’s not very much he can do about it." Pat said nothing. Bruce had said nothing about the neighbours, and perhaps this was the reason."
"These tests are designed to exclude others from the discourse - just as the word discourse is itself designed to do. These words are intended to say to people: this is a group thing. If you don't understand what we're talking about, you're not a member of the group. So, if you call this place the Canny Man's it shows that you belong, that you know what's what in Edinburgh. And that, you know, is what everybody wants, underneath. We want to belong."
"It was true, of course, there was an abnormal level of narcissism in our society, but it did not do, he told himself, to spend too much time going on about it. Society changed. Narcissism was about love, ultimately, even if only love of self. And that was better than hate.... Did it matter if young men thought of fashion and hair gel when, not all that many years ago, their thoughts tended to turn to war and flags and the grim partisanship of the football terrace?"
"It's like people inviting you to come along to a church service or an amateur orchestra. They're hoping that you'll join. People are recruiters at heart, you know. It makes them feel more comfortable to see the ranks of their particular enthusiasm swelling."
"It would be wonderful to have a guru; it would be like having a social worker or a personal trainer, not that people who had either of these necessarily appreciated the advice they received."
"The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that’s how it should be."
"One might expect bad behaviour from existentialists – indeed that was what existentialism was all about, was it not? – but to find this happening on one’s own doorstep was a shock."
"And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice – based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom – how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!"
"But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn’t it? – and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever."
"Things can end badly, as they sometimes do in life. But if they do, then we know that something is wrong, just as we know it when a piece of music doesn’t resolve itself properly at the end. We know that. We just do. And so we prefer harmony."
"It’s very important to be able to accept things, you know. Gracious acceptance is an art – an art which most of never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving."
"Old friends, like old shoes, are comfortable. But old shoes, unlike old friends, tend not to be supportive: it is easier to stumble and sprain an ankle while wearing a pair of old shoes than it is in new shoes, with their less yielding leather."
"Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run; it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry."
"Every small wrong, every minor act of cruelty, every act of petty bullying was symbolic of a greater wrong. And if we ignored these small things, then did it not blunt our outrage over the larger wrongs?"
"Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables."
"The writers in Zimbabwe were also [like the characters in the literature they produced] basically men at the time."
"The racism in England was not so institutionalized. Well, it was institutionalized, but then it was so efficiently realized that it didn’t need institutions, if you understand what I mean. In England, it was much easier not to be affected by it to that extent because my parents were students and people were somewhat respectful."
"I realize that creative women often do not fit easily into certain paradigms. I think to myself, Then where do they go? Where do they go? Because I feel that these women have so much to contribute, that they just see things in a different way. Every society has people like that and marginalizes them in some way. So it’s a very difficult situation."
"The skills I had learned for prose didn’t work in film. Those telling details, they’re completely different. Or the fact of these inner monologues in which you can write a whole book. Whereas prose is teasing out, film is stripping down, concentrating and compacting. I found I could not learn the one while doing the other. So it was a big struggle, actually. It took me years."
"People who fear greatly can sometimes substitute themselves for the thing they fear"
"Christine has that layer under her skin that cuts off her outside from her inside and allows no communication between the person she once believed she could be and the person she has in fact become. The one does not acknowledge the other's existence."
"I wrote the book just after Zimbabwe’s independence to encourage young Zimbabweans to develop themselves in spite of the challenges they would face doing so. There was also a lot of talk after independence of going back to one’s cultural roots. I wanted to interrogate that idea by examining aspects of the culture we were being told to go back to that affected women in my environment negatively. I was a newly minted feminist at the time and very eager. I also wanted to look at the ongoing effects of colonialism in the new dispensation. At the same time, I hoped to write a book that would be eminently readable, with recognizable characters."
"It wasn't African literature that I came to first. It was the Afro-American women writers, I found them very helpful. (Such as, for example?) Toni Morrison, who is really incredible. Then I read Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, and of course there are several others I can't remember right now."
"I have seen enough to know that blame does not come in neatly packaged parcels."
"Stars below instead of above! I wanted to see them straight away. I prayed for a miracle, for the sun to set."
"Keening. I remember keening that seemed to go on all through the night: shrill, sharp, shiny, needless of sound piercing cleanly and deeply to let the anguish in, not out."
"What I experienced that day was a short cut, a rerouting of everything I had ever defined as me into fast lanes that would speedily lead me to my destination. My horizons were saturated with me, my leaving, my going. There was no room for what I left behind."
"As for my sisters, well, they were there. They were watching me climb into Babamukuru's car to be whisked away to limitless horizons. It was up to them to learn the important lesson that circumstances were not immutable, no burden so binding that it could not be dropped,"
"Plunging into these books I knew I was being educated and I was filled with gratitude to the authors for introducing me to places where reason and inclination were not at odds. It was a centripetal time, with meat the centre, everything gravitating towards me. It was a time of sublimation with me as the sublimate."
"You had to know the facts if you were ever going to find the solutions."
"“How about forgetting?" you say. "Sometimes forgetting is better than remembering when nothing can be done." "Forgetting is harder than you think," says Nyasha. "Especially when something can be done. And ought to be. It's a question of choices.”"
"“You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice and that this cliff beckons you; worse, that you have a secret desire to fall over its edge into oblivion and that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice.”"
"“You begin to suspect that Cousin-Brother-in-Law and Nyasha are not being honest, that they found each other because neither possesses the hardiness success requires, so they have dressed discouragement up in the glamour of intellect.”"
"“He says he wants to go back to Germany,' Nyasha confides. 'As soon as he's finished his doctorate,' she goes on, as though both completion of his research and departure are imminent. You realize she does not know Cousin-Brother-in-Law is mulling another thesis because he is no longer interested in his subject. You are surprised your in-law is behaving in the way you expect your own black men to do, first of all by being so indecisive and then by not telling his wife.”"
"“How, with all your education, do you come to be more needy than your mother?”"
"“What we heard all the time is that you were not working. That's what was said, that that degree of yours was just a piece of paper sitting, silently rotting."
"A lot of my writing is triggered by something true, either something I read in the papers, something I overheard—I am an inveterate eavesdropper—or something that happened in my very large, and very extended, family. And yet it is precisely those things that no one believes are real."
"I think I am a better writer for being a lawyer. My mind is pretty chaotic because I am interested in so much, but it has been disciplined through my legal studies. I want to believe I am more measured in my responses to events, and that I am more analytical of my own motivations and self-justification. I am strongly opinionated but I have learned the gift of dispassion…"
"Authentic is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?"
"I think it’s become clear to people what my motivation is. I am not simply anti-government, and I’m not in opposition to any one person; I want to write about all the things that I think are making us into an unkind society…"
"Your language is your fountain of knowledge."
"In Africa, about 65 percent of the population is young people, and they are not despairing. Africa's hope lies in the young people of the continent who are embracing education and the gospel."
"It is still the same— Exactly the same. Take up arms and wage war Let your spear be education Let your shield be knowledge Let “truth at all times” be your motto Let your will be the determination to work hard For sisters illiterate still abound. Fight it to enlighten them Fight it by solidarity of purpose Without your participation Grandma fought it Mama fought it I still fight it You have to fight it Your daughters will have to fight it Fight on!"
"Even Africa has something to offer. We can offer love, and we can offer from the little we have, even as the story of the widow’s mite tells us, how she gave out of the abundance of her heart."
"Read! Write! Tomorrow's leader."
"One must find a way of not destroying the spirit in the process of trying to help"
"I am immersed in culture and try to speak it into my Ndebele novels ... These are things that make you who you are, although, of course, modernity is working to erase that. Children are coming along when broader family structures have been broken by urban life and individualism. Our languages themselves are slowly disappearing. These days you may meet a child who cannot speak her mother tongue while also lacking a natural relationship with the English they want to be identified with."
"A loved elder of literature."
"Everyone was emulating white culture from fashion, hairstyles and language. Because of the fad at the time, it would have been pretty normal for Barbara to choose English as the language of her novels. Not only was this going to make her appear more sophisticated but it would have boosted her profile, internationally. She, however, chose to use her mother tongue, becoming the second woman to publish in her native language after Lassie Ndondo."
"Meeting her opened my eyes. I realised that the most important thing when it comes to opportunity is not the actual opportunity, but your readiness."
"“When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky.”"
"I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away."
"As for the coldness, I have never seen it like this. I mean, coldness that makes like it wants to kill you, like it's telling you, with its snow, that you should go back to where you came from."
"“The problem with English is this: You usually can't open your mouth and it comes out just like that--first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.”"
"“There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that.”"
"“Further and further we go, and the sun keeps ironing us and ironing us and ironing us.”"
"“Aunt Fostalina says when she first came to America she went to school during the day and worked nights at Eliot’s hotels, cleaning hotel rooms together with people from countries like Senegal, Cameroon, Tibet, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and so on. It was like the damn United Nations there, she likes to say.”"
"“...and the women spread their ntsaroz and sit on one side, the men on the other, like they are two different rivers that are not supposed to meet.”"
"“Now when the men talk, their voices burn in the air, making smoke all over the place. We hear about change, about new country, about democracy, about elections and what-what."
"“If Messenger would be to open his mouth right now, his voice would be a terrible wound.”"
"“We're hungry but we're together and we're at home and everything is sweeter than dessert.”"
"“I think the reason they are my relatives now is they are from my country too - it's like the country has become a real family since we are in America, which is not our country.”"
"“I used to be very afraid of graveyards and death and such things, but not anymore. There is just no sense of being afraid when you live so near the graves; it would be like the tongue fearing the teeth.”"
"NoViolet Bulawayo has created a world that lives and breathes – and fights, kicks, screams, and scratches, too. She has clothed it in words and given it a voice at once dissonant and melodic, utterly distinct.""
"Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same."
"I must be in touch with the earth. I can never mistake the source of inspiration and energy to be gender, it is something we all share. It is true, however, that one best writes on themes, feelings, and sentiments one is more closely connected with. In this regard I like to think that I am writing. I am a woman. I am writing."
"She cried, and the women sang her back to sleep, willing a silence onto her. She defied them with her tiny speech-seeking voice and cried all day and all night until her mother fell asleep."
"I doubt that the natives can listen to an old woman like her. What can she tell them? This society has no respect for women, whom they treat like children. A woman has nothing to say in the life of the natives. Nothing at all."
"The dare was a large clearing in the center of the village. Those who were admitted to the dare knew the power of words. The midwife was also among the shapers of wisdom, who determined the future of the village."
"Our people know the power of words. It is because of this that they desire to have words continuously spoken and kept alive. We do not believe that words can become independent of the speech that bore them, of the humans who controlled and gave birth to them. [... ] The paper is the stranger’s own peculiar custom. Among ourselves, speech is not like the rock. Words cannot be taken from the people who create them. People are their words."
"Nehanda came out of me like a dream. It has the feeling of a dream when I look at it now. And that suited it, because it concerned a myth, a legend. It was a story of spirituality, of ancestors, a mystic consciousness and a history ... so it was much better to write it almost intuitively, out of my consciousness of being an African, as though I were myself a spirit medium, and I was just transferring or conveying the feelings, symbols and images of that. I wrote it at a time when I could write it, the way one might write a folk-song... I wrote it from remembrance, as a witness to my own spiritual history."
"How can words be made still [in writing], without turning into silence? Silence is more to be feared than the agitation of voices."
"If speaking is still difficult to negotiate, then writing has created a free space for most women -much freer than speech. The book is bound, circulated, read. It retains its autonomy much more than a woman is allowed in the oral situation."
"Time is as necessary for remembering as it is for forgetting. Even the smallest embrace of pain needs time larger than a pause; the greatest pause requires an eternity, the greatest hurt a lifetime. A lifetime is longer than eternity: an eternity can exist without human presence."
"I always need to be anchored in such a way that I am inside a character."
"I wanted to write beyond the photograph, you know, that frozen image, beyond the date, beyond the fact of her dying. If anything in my book she doesn't die, she departs."
"needed to enter [Nehanda's] mythic consciousness to really be part of it, to share it and to claim it as my own history and my own identity"
"What were our lives compared to the survival of the earth on which we stood?"
"Nehanda holds her silence all day, offering it with the palm of her hand as though it were something solid. She shouts.... closed out the earthly sounds that try to penetrate and disturb her silence."
"The land cannot be owned. We cannot give him any land because the land does not belong to the living."
"carrying the current of a roar that reminds them of who they have been in the past, but it is also the comforting voice of a woman, of their mothers whom they trust. Her voice throws them into the future."
"I would love to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love for her nation"
"I was asked by the publisher if I had more stories. I said 'yes' haphazardly, though I had none. He asked for them. Therefore I set out to write them"
"I would not write if I weren’t in search of beauty, if I was doing it only to advance a cause. I care deeply about my subjects, but I want to be consumed by figures of beauty, by story and character. It must be about perfection. Like a basket-maker or a weaver or a hair-plaiter, you are aware of what you are trying to accomplish from the first sentence"
"I am against silence"
"The books I write try to undo the silent posture African women have endured over so many decades"
"Our forefathers crafted a language that made it difficult to address these contentious issues. In African culture, for example, to talk to my father, I bow. If I am announcing that somebody has died, I use a particular language, a particular tone… so as to convey the message. But for subjects like incest and rape… you are not allowed to mention it. Even to your mother, who must pantomime the news if she tells your aunt"
"An empty box of matches. A single leather shoe with laces still attached… An inkstand says London. A magnificent metal spoon with a dove embossed on it. Selborne Hotel is written along the broken handle of a ceramic pot"
"My tales are tragic, rather than sad, meaning they have a catastrophic force"
"When I am not writing, which is most of the time… it is as though I am fasting. I am preparing myself. In other words, I no longer know what it is not to be consumed by writing. I anticipate sitting down with a story the way certain women anticipate lovers—with my breath held still, my knees shaking, a tidy room, a clean petticoat, and with no idea how the evening will turn out—in this case the book"
"I will have had enough intimacies to acquire a general sketch, a thrill, and a confidence. It is the same with books as it is with lovers. If you cannot feel your whole body move towards a book, then you are mostly doodling, or being quite separate from the act of writing. I spend many months between books fasting. I am meditative and spend many hours on my own, with my hunger growing. I love writing; it is a feast for my senses. I write to share this feast with a reader"
"The work is not their own: it is summoned. The time is not theirs: it is seized. The ordeal is their own."
"If not freedom then rhythm."
"Fumbatha could never be the beginning or end of all her yearning."